A heart-piercing ode to fatherhood
Beautiful Boy 15 cert, 120 min ★★★★★ Dir Felix van Groeningen
Starring Steve Carell, Timothée Chalamet; Maura Tierney, Amy Ryan, Kaitlyn Dever
If all parenting falls on a spectrum between the desires to smother your child with love and to strangle them, then Beautiful Boy could fairly be said to run the gamut. For his Englishlanguage debut, the Belgian director Felix van Groeningen has adapted the American journalist David Sheff ’s 2008 memoir about his son Nic’s descent into crystal meth addiction, and his attempts to both get his head around the crisis and drag his child out of it.
It is a film of rare emotional punch and complexity – not just wincingly sharp on the business of addiction in particular, but also a heart-piercing ode to fatherhood. David is played in various states of quiet and occasionally not-so-quiet devastation by Steve Carell; Nic by a Bafta-nominated Timothée Chalamet, all James Dean ragged magnetism and emergencyflare splutter and glow. The casting of the young actor, whose star has risen considerably since gay drama Call Me
By Your Name, feels note-perfect, not least for his uncanny ability to look simultaneously four years old and in his mid-20s. This is a film that understands – and also exploits, for serious melodramatic whack – that strange time-travel aspect of parenting, by which children remain children no matter how old they get.
That is to say that when David looks at his errant son, he sees the four-yearold and 12-year-old versions, too. Often, so do we. Just as van Groeningen’s 2012 film The Broken Circle Breakdown flitted between different times in its lead characters’ lives, in Beautiful Boy the past feels as present as the present. Early on, when David frantically drives around rain-lashed city streets after Nic goes missing from rehab, the scene is interspersed with moments from a past car journey, with young Nic (played by Jack Dylan Grazer as a pre-teen and Kue Lawrence as a tot) safely strapped beside David in the passenger seat. Such diversions aren’t presented as flashbacks, but just bubble up through the story unbidden: it sounds confusing, but soon becomes intuitive.
Van Groeningen and co-writer Luke Davies keep looking for ways like this to bend the rules of family melodrama a little, even as the film plants itself very squarely in that tradition: not just the wayward-teen Dean films of the Fifties, but also the genre’s resurgence in the late Seventies and early Eighties, with films such as Ordinary People and Kramer vs Kramer, which took stock of societal change. Ordinary People’s own troubled teen, Timothy Hutton, even shows up briefly as a doctor in Beautiful Boy’s opening sequence.
As Nic swerves from recovery to relapse, David treats the struggle in part as a kind of journalistic exercise, consulting experts and carrying out fieldwork, at the expense of his relationships with the rest of his family: his wife Karen (Maura Tierney) and their two much younger children, as well as Nic’s Los Angeles-based mother Vicki (Amy Ryan). But true to Sheff ’s book, no conventionally satisfying answers are forthcoming.
The best explanation Nic can offer is that his drug use “takes the edge off stupid, all-day reality” – never mind that this is referring to a comfortable middle-class upbringing near San Francisco. One of the smartest aspects of Carell’s performance are the notes of irritation and disappointment that creep into his paternal concern. For David, the ordeal is not just awful, but unfair: he’s obviously a good father who had a close relationship with his son.
For some, the treatment of Nic’s addiction as an almost random event might come over as a dereliction of dramatic duty. But I admired the film’s willingness to play straight: it keeps charting unexpected routes that are, of course, largely due to the story’s basis in fact. Naturally, there is much tear-jerking: the John Lennon song with which the film shares its title gets a good airing, and a scene where father and son part at an airport reduced me to a whimpering purée. But as good honest weepies go, this one feels a great deal more honest than most. RC